Its safe: An intelligent transportation system for improving safety and traffic efficiency

Abstract

Recently, many cities are facing challenging mobility and safety issues. The former is commonly related to traffic congestion, as a consequence of uncontrolled population growth and accelerated urbanization. The latter regards to elevated number of city-wide criminal incidents. Several Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) were proposed to overcome mobility issues; meanwhile, some safety- based systems were proposed to guide pedestrians and drivers toward safest paths. However, most of these systems tackle only one of the issues. Hence, an ITS can guide vehicles toward risky areas, in order to avoid traffic congestion, while a safety-based system can guide them toward congested roads, focusing on the safety of drivers and passengers. This paper introduces itsSAFE (Intelligent Transportation Systems for improving SAfety and traFfic Efficiency), an ITS which employs accurate knowledge about traffic conditions and unsafety levels on roads for improving the safety of drivers and passengers at the same time it deals with traffic congestion. Simulation results under a realistic scenario have shown that itsSAFE outperformed state-of-the-art approaches that deal with mobility or safety issues, by effectively dealing with traffic efficiency and safety.